1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure generally relates to a polyphenylene ether resin, and more specifically, to a polyphenylene ether compound or a prepolymer with improved properties, as well as a resin composition comprising the polyphenylene ether compound or the prepolymer and a product thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
With the rapid development of electronic technologies, information processing of electronic products, such as mobile communications, servers and cloud storage, has been developed toward high frequency signal transmission and high speed digitalization, such that resin materials having lower dielectric properties have become the mainstream for current high frequency and high transmission speed laminates so as to meet the demands of high-speed information transmission. The major requirements of resin products, such as copper-clad laminates, include lower dielectric constant (Dk), lower dielectric loss (a.k.a. dissipation factor, Df), higher reliability, higher thermal and moisture resistance, higher dimensional stability and so forth. Therefore, the industry aims to develop materials applicable to high performance printed circuit boards (PCB).
As compared with other resin materials, polyphenylene ether resins (PPE resins, also known as polyphenylene oxide resins, PPO resins) have lower dielectric constant and dielectric loss, thereby gradually becoming the ideal materials suitable for printed circuit boards of low dielectric properties at high frequency.
However, some properties of the currently available polyphenylene ether, such as dihydroxyl polyphenylene ether or bis(vinylbenzyl) polyphenylene ether, fail to meet the demands in the printed circuit board industry. For example, the performance of the conventional polyphenylene ether in flame retardancy, thermal resistance and so forth are not ideal. In order to solve the problems, flame retardants are incorporated into conventional polyphenylene ether resin compositions. Common flame retardants include phosphorus-containing compounds, such as condensed phosphate (e.g. PX-200, PX-202 and so forth), DOPO compounds (e.g. XZ92741 and so forth) or hypophosphite (e.g. OP-930, OP-935 and so forth), so as to improve the flame retardancy of conventional polyphenylene ether. However, these flame retardants not only deteriorate the dielectric properties but lower the thermal resistance of the products of the polyphenylene ether resin compositions. Thus, it is difficult to meet the requirements of dielectric properties, flame retardancy and thermal resistance at the same time.
Therefore, suppliers of resin compositions and manufacturers of laminates have the desire to develop novel polyphenylene ether compounds having better performances in dielectric properties, flame retardancy, thermal resistance and other properties.